For military, civil defense or disaster recovery operations, it is advantageous to deploy portable systems that can rapidly be brought into service. With respect to portable telecommunications systems, a “network-in-a-box” system is a portable system containing the Radio Access Network (RAN) as well as the core network components. Such a scaled-down system may be independent of the radio access technology used (e.g., UMTS, GSM, CDMA etc.), and is capable of providing telecommunications services to user equipment (UE) in a radio coverage area without being dependent on physical connectivity to any other telecommunications infrastructure. The system is completely self-contained and is capable of stand-alone operation.
Current network-in-a-box system deployments, however, prevent use of highly available types of systems (or highly available and redundant communication links) because of cost and/or survivability issues associated with operating conditions. Furthermore, a centralized solution would be impractical, and a distributed solution operating under realistic operating conditions should be robust against intermittent or permanent failures. Deploying a number of these homogeneous systems in a network configuration provides resilience to failures of individual systems because even if one or more systems in the network fail, the network may continue to provide cellular service.
When such a distributed system is deployed and utilizes an IP network to provide communication between individual systems, it is possible for the UEs being served by these systems to roam from one system to another. Also, it is expected that UEs will be able to access the full suite of services at each system.
A standard commercial cellular network uses an enormous number of configuration interfaces and parameters. Fully configuring such a network and bringing it into operation can take days and the efforts of many site personnel. Also, the users of such a system (e.g., soldiers, emergency responders) are typically not trained telecommunications engineers. These users, therefore, often have neither the knowledge nor the time that would be necessary to configure an entire cellular network. Accordingly, the configuration of such systems is typically reduced to the bare essentials to allow non-specialist operators can configure the system quickly and easily.
Though “network-in-a-box” systems exist for GSM and CDMA radio technologies (e.g., Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS)), these systems are usually intended for commercial applications and are complex to configure. They function as small-scale copies of the standard networks. Also, these systems are deployed in static topologies where the “neighbors” of each system are known in advance and are configured manually in each system. Thus, a network of such small-scale systems cannot be formed in an ad-hoc manner without extensive user planning and intervention.